What's in a name?

The new name of the White Sox ballpark, U.S. Cellular Field, rolls off the tongue as mellifluously as "CMGI Stadium" or "PSINet Stadium" does. Oops. They're gone.

It has the same ring of venerability and tradition as does, say, the TWA Dome in St. Louis, Adelphia Coliseum in Tennessee or Enron Field in Houston. Oops. They're gone, too.

The companies behind all those stadiums ran into, shall we say, financial difficulties. It was no surprise that one of the first things to go was the expensive advertising cost of placing your name on a stadium.

Is there a curse on corporate-named stadiums? We hope not. There are some good things to be said for the decision by the Sox and U.S. Cellular to team up. The cell phone company has agreed to pay $68 million over 20 years for the right to change Comiskey Park to U.S. Cellular Field.

The money will be spent on renovating the ballpark's upper deck, and the ballpark surely needs it. Fans have hated the upper deck since the day the park opened. (As Mayor Richard Daley once said, "you're up so far that you're next to God in heaven.")

The fans haven't developed any love for the rest of the ballpark either.

If there is a curse, it might be on the new (now gone) Comiskey Park. It was the last of the ballparks designed to make people think of a shopping mall. Shortly after came Camden Yards, the gorgeous home of the Baltimore Orioles, and the trend toward building retro-ballparks that pay homage to baseball tradition.

So Sox fans will finally get a better ballpark, though it will never be Camden Yards. In the exchange they will lose a name that has been associated with Chicago baseball since the old Comiskey Park opened in 1910.

But even at that, Chicago has been fickle. Fans were as likely to call their stadium Sox Park as they were to say Comiskey. (For that matter, it has been 40 years since the Comiskey family held major ownership in the team.)

The White Sox are taking some risk here. Major League Baseball often seems to forget that it is a game of tradition, of 7th-inning stretches, the smoky-sweet smell of hot dogs, squiggles and ticks on a scorecard. It's about a lot more than watching a handful of men make contact with a ball and run the bases. The more that sense of continuity and tradition gets shucked away, the more baseball risks losing its fans.

No, U.S. Cellular Field does not smack of tradition. Many fans will continue to call it Comiskey Park or Sox Park. The trick for the White Sox will be to see to see if they can take a modern corporate-name stadium and find a way to build a tradition that has been sorely missing since the day the place opened.